Written and edited by Norm Scott:
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Three pillars of The Resistance – providing information on current ed issues, organizing activities around fighting for public education in NYC and beyond and exposing the motives behind the education deformers. We link up with bands of resisters. Nothing will change unless WE ALL GET INVOLVED IN THE STRUGGLE!

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Modern School Views Strike End as Defeat

The elephant is still in the room:

What about the good teachers who
were laid off from low income, low performing schools? What about all those
current teachers who will be laid off over the next five years as Chicago shuts down
another 120 schools and converts 60 more to private charter schools?
How is it a victory for the union, if they will lose thousands of
members as a result of these layoffs? How is it a defeat for the
corporate ed reform agenda when they will get another 60 charter schools
and a weakening of the union as a result? -- Modern School blog

Rahmbo will be vicious, closing as many schools as he can and throwing thousands of teachers out of jobs. I don't know that they could have stopped this in the contract. The strike gives them some leverage in the public debate that will come over the closing schools and allows the union to mobilize masses of people to fight these closings, especially if they can sell them as retaliation.

I don't see that the democratic
process inside the union, so unusual -- and I contend that the lack of
democracy within top-down teacher unions like the UFT is as much a
reason for their decline as the attacks on them --- and national debate
that is taking place as a result of the strike as a defeat.

Let's get all sides in the discussion.

NYCORE on Friday night and MORE on Saturday will be talking about the Chicago story. So come on down and chip in.

Substance has also published various voices in Chicago. James Eterno at ICE and I at Ed Notes reprinted some of these: ICEUFT Blog.

Posted on the Big Education Ape, a parent blog. http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/

Chicago Teachers Strike Ends in Defeat for Teachers and Unions

The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) voted today to end their strike. 98% of
the 800 delegates voted in favor of ending the strike, according to the New
York Times, though the union’s 26,000 members would still have to ratify
the new contract, which could take several weeks.

The new contract would give teachers a modest raise and prohibit merit
pay, but it would also lengthen the work day by 90 minutes and require that 30%
of teachers’ evaluations be based on their students’ test scores. The new
contract would also reserve half of new job openings for laid off teachers, but
only if they had strong ratings based on these test scores.

How is it a victory for
teachers (or students), or a defeat for the corporate ed reform agenda, to accept
that 30% of teacher evaluations will be based on unreliable and inconsistent
student test data (see here, here and here)? Considering that student test data, also known as Value Added
Measures, or VAM, is almost entirely worthless as a measure of teacher
effectiveness, it should not be allowed at all. Furthermore, the 30% rule will
only encourage more teaching to the test, dumbing down and narrowing of the
curriculum, and laying off of perfectly good teachers because they happen to
work in low income schools, where student test scores and gains on those scores
tend to be lower.

Likewise, how is it a
victory for teachers if only half of new job openings go to laid off teachers
and only to those who have high VAM scores? What about the good teachers who
were laid off from low income, low performing schools? What about all those
current teachers who will be laid off over the next five years as Chicago shuts down
another 120 schools and converts 60 more to private charter schools?
How is it a victory for the union, if they will lose thousands of
members as a result of these layoffs? How is it a defeat for the
corporate ed reform agenda when they will get another 60 charter schools
and a weakening of the union as a result?

Nevertheless, SB 7 was
an attack on collective bargaining and union power. Therefore, by accepting the
30%, CTU is capitulating to state-mandated restrictions on union activities. For
the rest of the nation, the message is clear: Collective bargaining does not
have to be banned outright, as it was in Wisconsin. It can simply be so
hamstrung by legislatively-imposed pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo (e.g., VAM) that
it becomes an impotent and meaningless endeavor.

Ending the strike may
have been the most expedient tactic under the current circumstances. It
certainly is easier, cheaper and less fraught than continuing to fight. And the
teachers did halt some of the most onerous concessions that were being sought.
However, the 30% should be seen as a defeat, not only because it will cause many good teachers
to receive bad evaluations and potentially lose their jobs, but because it will encourage further legislative and
legal attacks on union power.

============
The opinions expressed on EdNotesOnline are solely those of Norm Scott and are not to be taken as official positions (though Unity Caucus/New Action slugs will try to paint them that way) of any of the groups or organizations Norm works with: ICE, GEM, MORE, Change the Stakes, NYCORE, FIRST Lego League NYC, Rockaway Theatre Co., Active Aging, The Wave, Aliens on Earth, etc.

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UFT Election Vote Comparison: 2004-10

A Personal Historical Perspective

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"A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

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"Ed Reformers" want to cash in on public education and to control its content and outcome, not improve it. Provide great education? Baby boomers had as close as this country has ever gotten to it when we were growing up. The Ed Reform Movement has no interest in seeing such a well-educated, democratically astute population ever again.

History of the UFT Pre-Weingarten Years

This award-winning series of articles by Jack Schierenbeck originally appeared in the New York Teacher in 1996 and 1997.

Naturally, from a certain point of view. But, despite certain biases, Schierenbeck, a great guy, was one of the best NY Teacher reporters so this is worth reading. Jack suffered a debilitating stroke many years ago (I used to get secret donations to ed notes from him through a 3rd source.)

“The schism in the union over radical politics [is] a major reason for stalling the growth of a teacher union for decades.” Revolutionary politics and ideology take center stage, as the original Teachers Union becomes a battlefield, pitting leftist against leftist and splitting the union.

Clarence Taylor's "Reds at the Blackboard" focused on the old Teachers Union which disbanded in 1964 after suffering from anti-left attacks.

Effective Union Organizing

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The second series started last week and it's called "Online Campaigning for Union Activists"

You Don't Have A Choice - Join the Revolt

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Ex-Harlem Success Teacher Comments on Eva the Diva

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“Waiting for Superman" is the second most intellectually dishonest piece of documentary work I have seen. It is surpassed only by Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will," the pro-Hitler propaganda classic, in that regard. Uses personal narratives of adorable children to create narrative suspense that overrides public policy discussion with pure emotion in unscrupulous attack on teachers and their unions, among others

Timothy TysonProfessor of African American Studies and HistoryDuke University

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"We must close union offices, confiscate their money and put their leaders in prison. We must reduce workers salaries and take away their right to strike"- Adolf Hitler, May 2, 1933

How Teaching Experience Makes a Difference

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Outsource our children

Weingarten/Gates Foundation announce drone-driven teacher evaluation

According to a press release issued by the Gates Foundation, the AFT and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, these three have entered a ground-breaking partnership to evaluate teachers utilizing the drone technology that has revolutionized warfare in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. A bird-size device floats up to 400 feet above a classroom and instantly beams live video of teachers in action to agents at desks at Teacher Quality Inspection Stations established by the AFT and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

When asked if the drones were authorized to drop bombs on teachers who exhibit inadequacy, Chester E. Finn, Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, replied, "Don't be ridiculous. Gates money puts other methods at our disposal."

Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.5-million-member American Federation of Teachers said the powerful union has signed on to the drone project...

Teacher Value-Added Data Dumping by Norm Scott

The Real Reason Behind Push for Standardized Tests: It's All About the Adults

On standardized testing in our schools

A must read article about the standardized test industry.Written by an insider who has worked as a test scorer, the article outlines a multinational industry based on an army of temporary workers paid by the piece at $0.30 to $0.70 per test, translated in the need to grade 40 tests per hour to make a $12 salary. The article goes on to show how the companies gauge the grading "results" based on the need to ensure new contracts to continue profiting off of our youth. The original article is from Monthly Review. Here it is on Schools Matter blog.

From Sharon Higgins

Parallels between America today and Germany in the 1920's and early 30's

"Resentment and obstruction are all the right wing in America have to peddle. Their policies are utterly discredited. Their ideology - even by its own standards - is a sham. They are so bereft of leaders, their de facto leader is a former drug addicted, thrice-divorced radio talk show host. That is literally the best they can muster. But they have built a national franchise inciting the downwardly mobile to blame the government, not the right, for their problems, exactly as Hitler did in the 1920s."

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